About Hyvä
Hyvä is a frontend theme for Magento 2, built from the ground up to replace Luma. It delivers dramatically better performance, a modern developer experience, and a leaner codebase — without touching a single line of your backend.
Why Luma wasn't enough
Magento 2's default Luma theme was released in 2015. Its frontend stack — KnockoutJS, RequireJS, and Less CSS — made sense at the time, but the web has moved on. KnockoutJS hasn't had a meaningful update in years, RequireJS creates enormous JavaScript bundles, and the result is slow, bloated pages that consistently fail Core Web Vitals.
The alternative — going fully headless — solves the performance problem but introduces enormous complexity and cost. Hyvä sits squarely in the middle: native Magento, modern stack, production-grade performance.
The stack
A lightweight JavaScript framework for composing behaviour directly in markup. Replaces KnockoutJS with a fraction of the footprint.
Utility-first CSS framework. Styles live alongside markup, speeding up development and eliminating dead CSS from production builds.
Hyvä keeps Magento's native PHTML templating. Most block logic lives in a single file — easier to read, maintain, and debug.
Cart, checkout, and dynamic UI components communicate with Magento via GraphQL, replacing the RequireJS-heavy Luma approach.
How Hyvä came to be
Hyvä was created by Dutch developer Willem Wigman, a long-time Magento core contributor who grew frustrated with Luma's performance ceiling. Rather than waiting for Adobe to modernise Magento's frontend, he built one from scratch.
Willem Wigman begins development of Hyvä as a response to Luma's performance limitations.
Hyvä 1.0 is released publicly. The Magento community response is immediate — it quickly becomes the leading alternative to Luma.
The Hyvä ecosystem grows rapidly. Checkout, UI components, and an extension compatibility layer are introduced.
Hyvä becomes the de-facto standard for new Magento 2 builds focused on performance. Hundreds of agency partners worldwide.
Continued investment in the ecosystem: Hyvä Checkout, React Storefront, and growing extension compatibility.
Hyvä goes open source. Hyvä Themes B.V. announces the theme is now free and publicly available, removing the licence fee requirement and opening the codebase to the community.
FAQ
See Hyvä for yourself
Browse a fully functional Hyvä storefront — no login or setup required.